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The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, 2007

A slender novel exploring the disillusion of a Pakistani Princeton graduate, newly hired New York master of the universe, in love with a wealthy beautiful New York socialite. Did 9-11 start his disillusionment; or was it the mental illness of his lover; or was it the Chilean publisher pointing out the similarities of his career situtation to that of the Christian Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire? The language is engrossing and perceptive as here where he ruminates on New York after 9-11

I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white.

Food Street Lahore

He quits his New York job and returns to Lahore. The novel is structured entirely as a monologue by the disillusioned Pakistani given in a Lahore restaurant to a complete stranger, a large silent foreigner, possibly an American spook, who may or may not come to grief at the end of the evening. Masterfully nuanced performance.

Moth Smoke, Hohsin Hamid, 2000

Moth Smoke, titled for the moth’s love of the flame, and written before the military coup d’état of general Pervez Musharraf in October 1999 and before the events of 9-11, was Hamid’s first novel. Set in Lahore at the time of Pakistan’s first nuclear test in May 1998, a time of fear and economic disruption, mixed with pride as Pakistan becomes the worlds first Muslim member of still small nuclear bomb club; the novel explores the effects of monumental corruption on two best childhood friends.

The boys’ fathers were in the military during the West Pakistan – Bangladesh fighting in 1971. One father dies and the other turns to corruption believing that one is either an exploiter or will become the exploited. The father builds a fortune through bribery and kickbacks from foreign corporate contracts then turns to money laundering to sustain and expand his fortune.

When his mother dies the friend’s son becomes an orphan raised by an uncle. The rich father assures the orphan attends the best schools in Pakistan where he associates with his son and other elite children. The orphan applies for college in the States but is unable to get financial aid so he attends college in Pakistan while all his circle of school friends leave for England or the States.

Lahore Country Club

The orphan studies for a doctorate in Pakistan under a radical professor choosing as dissertation subject Mohammad Unis micro credit financing. He drops out to accept a banking job arranged by his friend’s father. He grows increasingly resentful of his job as servant (pretty well paid) to the rich and corrupt and is fired just as his friend returns, sexy wife and child in tow, from a successful career in New York. From a “small fish in a big pond” he immediately becomes a part of the young social elite by virtue of his father’s wealth.

The novel is an account of the orphan’s decline and final destruction while his former friend continue to thrive through his family’s corrupt ways, carrying large sums of money to Switzerland and the Cayman Islands for laundering.

Lahore Charpoy

One of the most compelling sections explores the effects of air conditioning in separating the haves from the have nots in Lahore where summertime temperatures can reach 115 degrees (Just like Phoenix, although the homeless can go to the underutilized downtown public library during the day but only if they do not fall asleep). The orphan finally understands poverty when his power is disconnected for non payment and he is forced to live for the first time as an AC have not.

A street urchan, who knows that air conditioners throw off hot air into the streets is confused by the insistence of the rich that ACs produce cold air.

Manucci realized what all this had to mean. It meant people thought what he called hot air was cold air. So whenever he walked down the street past the back of a protruding AC, he would smile and say, “What cold air it makes. Wonderful.”

Pakistan has too little and notoriously unreliable electric power, not coincidentally because of bribes, kickbacks and shoddy foreign corporate contract work. The power problems are small inconvenience to the elite who use a little of their corrupt gains to buy personal power generators.

The novel changes voices from the orphan, to his friend, to his friend’s father, to his friend’s wife, so we get to see their various lives from their own viewpoint. At first jarring, this technique may be the only way to allow us to feel some empathy for the rationalizations used by each actor for justifying his otherwise reprehensible actions. Its a little like listening to Alfie (Michael Caine in the original movie) rationalize his actions. There are no heroes here.

Climbing the Mango Trees; A Memoir of a Childhood in India, Madhur Jaffrey, 2006

Madhur Jaffrey is an author of Indian cookbooks and an actress who is said to have been responsible for introducing James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. Jaffrey appeared in a number of their earlier films: “Shakespeare Wallah” (1965, won Berlin Film Festival’s Best Actress), “The Guru” (1969), Autobiography of a Princess, (1976) and Heat and Dust (1983) directed by Ivory. And also “The Perfect Murder” (1988) and Merchant’s “Cotton Mary” (1999, title role).

She also appeared in “Six Degrees of Separation” (1993) with Stockard Channing (“Le Divorce”), Mary Beth Hurt (“Slaves of New York”) and “Vanya on 42nd Street” (1994) with Julianne Moore (“Surviving Picasso”), Larry Pine (“Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures”), Wallace Shawn (“The Bostonians”).

Here, Jaffrey writes about her family of the Hindu subcaste Mathur Kayasthas, administrators of justice and recorders of events. Her family worked in Delhi as administrators for the Mogul rulers until the British brought the capital to Delhi when they went to work for the British. As a reward for their loyalty to the British in a time of Indian uprisings they were given a large parcel of land on the Yamuna River. The patriarch turned down a choice of land in New Delhi saying “Who wants to live in that jungle”. Jaffrey ruefully notes that property in New Delhi today is worth as much as property in London. Her family was so extensive that a picnic or celebration might be attended by 300 or more relatives. Her father headed a number of companies during her childhood.

To escape the heat of summer the family spent summers in the “hill stations” Dalhousie. After partition they often went to Simla. This was a custom started by the British.

Born is 1933 Jaffrey was 12 at the end of WWII and 14 at the time of India’s independence and partition (into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan). She notes that many Indians were killed in WWII (but seemingly no one known to her or her family). Millions were killed during partition and tens of millions were displaced from their homes. She notes that a number of her privileged Muslim classmates left for England or Pakistan. Delhi swelled from a million inhabitants to over ten million, mostly impoverished refugees. Jaffrey notes that all the taxis were now driven by Sikhs and restaurants started offering tandoori oven meats and breads, kabobs, lassie (a yogurt drink) and other Punjabi culinary delights. She left India to study acting a few years after partition and has lived in England and the United States since.

This book gives a good picture of what it is like to grow up privileged and insular. The India she describes is a picture book India of good times and good food taking place during the key years of the Congress party struggle for independence with Gandhi and Nehru risking imprisonment; of the British forcibly enlisting Indians to fight in Burma and Europe for the British in WWII; of the rise of the Muslim League and the tragic British partition of India as the British left India behind. Like privileged classes everywhere, her childhood memories contain very little of this life and death struggle, the poverty, the displacement, the terror of this time. Money and privilege buys an insulation from these larger realities. What did she really think of the tumultuous times of her childhood? We don’t know from this book.

The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonnington and the Tragedy of Climbing’s Greatest Generation, Clint Willis, 2006

In the current playgrounds of their sport, mountaineers learn what primitive people know instinctively – that mountains are the abode of the dead, and that to travel in the high country is not simply to risk death but to risk understanding it. Robert Reid Mountains of the Great Blue Dream

Books on climbing normally focus on the adventure, achievement, clashes among climbers, and tragedy. Or more recently, on the commercialization and destruction of the “extreme” sport where, for enough money, practically anyone can have an oxygen mask strapped on and be carried to the top of Everest. Good works exist on the lives of Anatoli Boukreev and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and his family. But getting to know the climbers and what goes on in their heads in less common. It is precisely this inner dimension that Willis is adept at describing. During Bonnington’s first time on the Eiger Willis narrates:

He (Bonnington) took an hour to climb 60 feet. Ian (Clough) from time to time peered up at him and saw the rope still hanging free. They both knew that a slip here would kill them, but Chris knew this like a piece of news or history he couldn’t manage to believe. He put it well aside and got on with standing just so or tugging cautiously at a hold; his mortality shrank to a concept. And still his knowledge of the risk colored every action he performed, lending his movements and the stillness between them a deliberate and serious quality that awoke his desire for peace, for clarity.

On the direct Eiger route named for John Harlin who fell to his death when a rope broke, Willis writes:

Dougal (Haston) felt himself flotsam on the surface of something vast and deep…John’s death was a part of that dark scenery. Dougal felt a sense of urgent gratitude, almost painful in its intensity; he was alive with this task to perform…Dougal felt his isolation on the face. He liked the Germans; they grieved for Harlin without falling apart or expecting anyone else to do so. But Dougal was not like them…He could ignore the cold as well as his own spasms of grief and fear and the odd and somehow unfinished fact of John’s death. He would finish the climb whatever anyone else might choose to do.

Eiger North Face

Willis’ book includes an inner life account of the remarkable climb of Annapurna’s south face by one of the greatest teams of climbers ever assembled. To understand this feat compare it to the north face of the notorious Eiger which has a summit of 13,000 feet and is about 5900 feet above the valley below. Annapurna’s south face starts at about 17,500 feet and extends to the summit at 26,545 feet. Most of the climb is in the death zone.

Climbers killed on Annapurna include famed Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev in 1997 and Christian Kuntner in 2005.

Annapurna’s Anatoli Boukreev Shrine

Climbing in the Himalayas there is always the altitude, the thin air. Willis writes:

Peter (Boardman) was feeling the altitude without knowing it and he lost himself in games, in the twisted logic of dreams. He named the various knots cows and thought of the pitons as Americans. He gave a girl’s name to each of the carabiners that dangled from his waist.

After Doug Scott, Peter Boardman, and Joe Tasker had summited sacred Kangchenjunga, Willis writes:

They had been afraid to die on the mountain; now they feared a return to a world where such matters were misunderstood, where people thought dying mattered more than it did. They were afraid to leave behind the clarity of intention that had possessed them here. They were afraid not to know what to do. They felt uplifted and unworthy at once — they were drunk with confusion and joy and anxiety. They had come here and retrieved something. They worried that they couldn’t protect it, that they hadn’t changed and that they would forget.

Kangchenjunga

Completing this work featuring climbs from 1958 to 1985, the reader is surprised to realize that almost all of Boning ton’s boys have been killed in the mountains, one or two at a time. For each death, Willis imagines and narrates the last moments; what was the climber thinking as he fell, was buried, or simply quit. The most surprising account is the death of Peter Boardman, perhaps the strongest of all Chris’s boys at high elevation. Peter was climbing the northeast ridge of Everest with Joe Tasker in 1982, who had already suffered two strokes earlier in the climb. Willis posits that Joe slipped, caught himself, and suffered a final massive stroke which killed him. Willis speculates that Peter sat down briefly to grieve and never got up again. Peter’s body was found on the northeast ridge in 1992.

Chris Bonnington finally summited Everest for the first time in 1985 at the age of 50. Willis wryly notes that Chris had any number of Everest ghosts to help him up.

The tragedy of the title seems not so much all the deaths, although they are certainly tragedies for the families left behind, but that these young men cannot imagine life without the challenge of the climb; the new mountain, the new route, the lighter expedition. They keep returning until they die.

Their ever smaller teams of two to four climbers and Alpine style fast ascents without supplemental oxygen predicts the arrival of Anatoli Boukreev in the next generation; the solo climber able to tackle up to four 8000 meter peaks each season with virtually no equipment or support. And like them, Boukreev continues to return till his death. He simply can’t imagine any other life.

Grumble: Book editing is steadily deteriorating today and this book reaches a new low with entire sentences truncated or repeated on the next page (photo insert). The blame probably rests with an increased dependence on computer typesetting and grammar checking unaided by human proofreaders. The human reader doesn’t really need this added challenge.

Annapurna South Face, Chris Bonnington, 1971

Bonnington wrote this account and took most of the remarkable pictures in the book. Perhaps most remarkable is the folded photo in the back of the book of the south face with the climb route, camps, and elevations shown.

Sisters and Actresses

The notorious Soong family featured four famous American educated siblings. Ai-Ling was the oldest daughter and money loving mastermind of the family. T.V. said of Ai-Ling; had she been born a man, she would have run China. Next was daughter Ching Ling who married Sun Yat-sen, father of China, in a political marriage. Next was oldest son T.V., Harvard educated financier and diplomat, one of the wealthiest men in China. Next was daughter Mei-ling who, after ten years of being courted by numerous young English speaking men in Shanghai, married Chiang Kai-shek in a political marriage brokered by Ai-Ling. (See Chiang’s Shanghai Residence) Under the deal, T.V. became finance minister in the Nationalist government. The three sisters were portrayed in a recent film by Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung and Vivian Wu: The Soong Sisters

These siblings were the children of a Hakka cabin boy and an aristocratic Christian. Schooled in Georgia as a missionary, Charles returned to Shanghai and married aristocratic Ni Guizhen who traces her ancestry to Xu Guangqi, prime minister during the Ming Dynasty who converted to Catholicism in 1601. Snubbed and discriminated against by fellow missionaries, Soong turned to business where his command of English, education, and understanding of Americans and the West made him a natural go between. He amassed a fortune and began an association with Sun Yat-sen.

Ching Ling (Madame Sun) differentiated herself from her siblings, believing that the Communists were better stewards of her late husband’s three principals than were the Kuomintang. She continued living in Shanghai after the Communist takeover until her death in 1981. Although she never joined the Communist party, she was honored with a period of national mourning and given a full state funeral in Beijing, lying in state for three days in the Great Hall of the People near Tiananmen Square.

FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover depicted the other three Soongs as money mad, engaging in a giant conspiracy to divert Lend-Lease supplies for personal profit. When Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, several large anonymous donations from Hong Kong appeared at U.S. schools attended by the Soongs.

Ai-Ling’s three children, David, Louis, and Jeanette Kung ran the China Lobby, spending large sums to influence American congressmen and administrations. The China Lobby had its “finest” hours during the Joseph McCarthy era, providing money and laying much of the groundwork for the Senator’s charges.

In 1968 Chiang Kai-shek sent a suitcase of unmarked dollars to the Nixon Presidential campaign. This campaign contribution has to rank as the most counterproductive attempts to influence policy in the long and corrupt history of American campaign financing. Nixon’s move to recognize the PRC and remove Taiwan from the U.N. Security Council and ultimately from the U.N., entirely isolated Taiwan from the community of nations. (If only the defense, energy, and pharmaceutical industries could have such an influence on policy with their contributions.)

Eleanor Roosevelt said of Mei-ling; “She can talk beautifully about democracy. But she does not know how to live democracy.”

Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek) was particularly popular among Americans for her command of English. Living in Macon Georgia from the age of nine to fifteen, and in Boston from fifteen to nineteen, gave Mei-ling both a perfect Southern Bell Georgia Peach accent and a perfect clipped Yankee accent. She had an understanding of the racist South and the Puritanical New England Yankee north. Her ten years of various courtships in Shanghai (only with English speakers) perfected her skills of flirtation and coquetry. American men were particularly susceptible to her charms. She may have had affairs with several Westerners and Americans including perennial Presidential candidate Republican Wendell Wilkie.

Mei-ling made two extended trips to the U.S. to attempt to influence policy; first in 1943 at the height of the war with Japan, and again in 1966. On both occasions her lavish lifestyle and imperial manner struck the American public wrong. She traveled with a large entourage of servants, secretaries, public relations personnel, and bodyguards; in 1943 by private train; and in 1966 by chartered jet. She stayed with FDR in the White House but insisted on using her own silk sheets (for a skin condition) at a time when American women were unable to buy silk. Both Mei-ling’s trips coincided with release of story after published story about the actual and horrific conditions in China and Taiwan under the Chiangs and the Nationalists.

Mei-ling managed to snub both the English King and Churchill refusing to meet them. When FDR invited her to a white house dinner with Churchill she turned the invitation down. Even her diplomat brother T.V. could not persuade her to accept.

Mei-ling owned twenty houses in Taiwan and three in New York including a multi-floor 14 room apartment at 10 Gracie Square in Manhattan where she lived with her entourage in the mid 80′s and from the mid 90′s until her death in 2003 (Yes, the chronically ill Mei-ling lived 104-106 years). In 1995 Bob Dole and Paul Simon sponsored a reception for Mei-ling. The reception was ignored by all former Presidents but was tellingly attended by Republicans Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Alan Simpson.
For a biography of Mei-ling see Madame Chiang Kai-Shek

Spying for the Raj, Jules Stewart 2006.

The northern boundary of South Asia is and has always been protected by a formidable barrier of mountains and ferocious tribes. This is the story of attempts by the British, primarily in the 19th Century, to learn more about the geography and trade possibilities of this fascinating region.

Knowing that white travelers could never survive in this region, the British Survey Office, located in Dehra Dun recruited and trained native spies in fine arts like learning to walk with a measured stride and counting their steps on prayer beads (modified from the normal 108 beads to 100) for measuring trekking distances; mercury thermometers and barometers for determining altitude, and sextants for measuring location.

These early 007′s were primarily gatherers of information for mapmakers, though each received a secret code name like NA, RN, PA, GK, GM, GNM, etc. They were given the honorary designation of Pundit, meaning scholarly or wise and were the model for Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

The spies were often native and spoke the languages and were intimate with the cultures of their target territories. To avoid official discovery, they disguised themselves as religious pilgrims or occasionally native doctors. Some were lamas so the religious disguises were authentic.

We follow amazing journeys through Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Tibet, and even China.

The most effective spies were Pundit Nain Singh, Pundit Kishen Singh, Pundit Sarat Chandra Das, and the illiterate Pundit Kintup

The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet; Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, 2002.

The CIA book hardly deals with events inside Tibet under Chinese occupation, mainly because few of their trained Tibetans were ever inside Tibet. The CIA of this book are not the ham fisted bumbling folks of the current middle east. They are competent, most often decorated veterans of WWII. They know to consult experts like Heinrich Harrer (Seven Years in Tibet) and to employ noted Buddhist scholar Mongolian Geshe Wangal as interpreter, teacher, and translator. It was Wangal who helped develop a Tibetan phrase code book for use in coded radio transmissions.

Much technology was developed for this effort including long range high altitude airdrops and steerable parachutes pioneered by Missoula smoke jumpers who were recruited by the CIA for this effort.
Yet, in twenty years of efforts, their most notable success was the accidental ambush of one jeep carrying a Chinese commander with a satchel of documents. Most Tibetan trained agents were captured or killed upon entering Tibet.
This book is mostly a history of the ever changing geopolitical realities for the US, India, Pakistan, China, and the Soviet Union. Tibet and the trained Tibetan fighters somehow get lost and forgotten in these “bigger” realities including Indian Pakistan warfare and the Vietnam war. Two groups of fighters were trained and armed, one in India after the Chinese invasion in 1962 and the other in Nepal in the sub kingdom of Mustang near Pokhara and Annapurna.

The only serious fighting ever done by these Tibetans was their Indian sponsored use against Pakistan during the East Pakistan war of independence leading to the formation of Bangladesh. In this war, the Tibetans proved very able and successful fighters.
Still, the book is interesting reading, revealing little known details about the CIA involvement in South Asia. For instance; Nepal today boasts a number of successful Tibetan businesses including carpet manufacturing and hostel hotel operation. These business were made possible by CIA contributions as the Mustang Tibetan fighters were relocated and retrained.
The Dalai Lama appears occasionally in this book but the focus remains clearly on CIA activities.

Manchurian Adventure; Sylvain Mangeot 1974.

Manchurian Adventure is an incredible tale of a Chinese Manchurian soldier of fortune. Trained by the Japanese as a pilot and possessing uncommon skills with machinery and language, Lobsang Thondup (assumed name) moves from one impossible situation to the next in Siberia, Manchuria, China and Sinkiang, Tibet, and Bhutan. In Tibet he becomes the lover of Dhorji Paghmo, Tibet’s only woman “Living Buddha” and ranked third in the Buddhist hierarchy. When the Dalai Lama escapes to India in 1959, Lobsang also escapes to Bhutan where his engineering skills lead him into friendships with the King and the Prime Minister. Of course things go wrong and he ends up imprisoned in a jail of his own design.
In addition to being a great adventure read, this book gives a better idea of life in the area during this time of historic upheaval.

For more on the CIA’s history throughout the world see

David Oliver Relin’s book “Three Cups of Tea” documents the life and work of Pakistani school builder Greg Mortenson. Mortenson is the son of missionaries who grew up in Tanzania where his parents built a teaching hospital. Mortenson climbed Kilimanjaro when he was eleven and became hooked on climbing. He became a nurse in the San Francisco bay area to support his rock climbing living in his Buick.

Greg Mortenson and kids.

After rescuing a French climber during an attempt on K2, Mortenson got lost on his descent out of the mountains and ended up in the Balti village of Korphe not on his map. The village headman Haji Ali and his wife offered the hospitality of their own home while Mortenson recovered and Mortenson promised to build the village a school (emulating his parents and hero Sir Edmund Hillary).

Mortenson wrote an article about his K2 experience for a climbing journal where venture angel Jean Hoerni learned about Mortenson’s wish to build a school. Based on a single phone call (from a pay phone) Hoerni sent Mortenson a check (to a P.O. box) for $12,000. Mortenson bought materials for the school only to realize that the materials couldn’t be delivered to the village without a bridge. Mortenson met Hoerni at the annual Himalayan Association meeting where he was given another $10,000 for the bridge and $20,000 to live on so he could work full time on his school.

Hoerni died of Leukemia shortly after the school was finished leaving Mortenson $1,000,000 to build more schools.

When he had spent the money, Jon Krakauer “Into Thin Air” and “Under the Banner of Heaven” introduced Mortenson to the editor of Parade magazine who ran a cover story on Mortenson’s work. The article resulted in a deluge of letters and contributions, allowing Mortenson to continue building schools. To date Mortenson has built 55 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Along the way, he turned down a U.S. military offer of surreptitious funds. Mother Teresa would probably have accepted the money.

Mortenson seems to have an instinct for surrounding himself with able associates. He has defeated two fatwa’s from fundamental mullahs using the Shia legal system. The first ruling came from Qom in Iran praising Mortenson’s (the infidel) work including the education of girls. The second ruling from Pakistan nullified the Fatwa and ordered the mullah to pay for the material his thugs had destroyed when they attacked a school under construction.

Mortenson provided an important source of information via his extensive contacts in the mountains of Pakistan after the recent earthquake.
Greg Mortenson on the Pakistan Earthquake

Emperor of Japan, Meiji and His World 1852-1912, Donald Keene 2002

The most remarkable changes in the history of Japan occured during the sixty year reign of a single emperor, Meiji. Keene’s book tries to unveil the man Meiji about which little is known or has been written.

Meiji

Diplomat Makino Nobuaki said of Meiji:

The emperor had almost no private side to him. He also had no preferences. There was nothing to choose between his living quarters and those the the aristocracy. If anything, his were simpler. They merely served his needs. When he made a journey, it was never for pleasure but always for the sake of the country. He initiated public works but never because of his own tastes; everything was done because it was necessary for the nation. He did not give permission for public building to be erected unless they were needed to receive foreign visitors or for state business. He did not buy things because he wanted them but in order to encourage industry or protect art. He led almost no life apart from his work.

The London Times wrote:

He possessed a remarkable faculty of judging character, and where his confidence had once been given, occasion to recall it never occurred. He possessed also a rarer trait, absolute willingness that others should wear the laurels of success, for he asked of the nation nothing except that it should honour and trust the Throne’s servants, reserving to the Throne only the reverence form of prestige.

1889 Celebrating the new Constitution of Imperial Japan in Kyoto

The emporer’s name was chosen by casting the I Ching Oracle and deriving a reign name (nengo) from the resulting passage: “The sage, facing south, listens to the world; facing the light, he governs.” The name Meiji came to be interpreted as meaning “enlightened rule”. For the first time in Chinese or Japanese history the reign name Meiji applied to his entire life and was not changed at his death.

King Kalakaua of Hawaii was the first foreign monarch to visit Meiji. Next to Meiji at 5’4″, tall for a Japanese at the time, Kalakaua was a giant. Kalakaua was traveling to Japan unanounced until an American diplomat tipped off the royal court who pulled out all the stops to prepare a welcome worthy of a visiting monarch. For Japan it was a means of learning the practices of Western state visits and protocols. Kalakaua was overwhelmed by the magnitude and scale of his welcome. Kalakaua proposed that his niece Kaiulani, then only five and future Queen of Hawaii, be accepted as bride to Prince Sadamaro, who was later legally adopted by Meiji. Meiji turned Kalakaua down.

Just prior the the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the annual lecture delivered before Meiji was a strangely prophetic reading from David Hume’s History of England describing the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the British. Japan destroyed the entire Russian naval fleet during the war.

President Theodore Roosevelt played a key role in the Russo-Japanese peace negotiations for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. The English wife of a Russian prisoner was unimpressed:

Peace as she is hammered out at the American Cronstadt! … Japan and Russia have not made peace – nor wanted it. Oh, no! That terrible American President, Il Strenuoso, he has made it. He wanted it, he would have it. And I believe him capable of locking the conferees in a room and starving them into obedience.

King Edward VII conferred the medieval Order of the Garter on Meiji. When Prince Arthur was buckling the garter below Meiji’s knee he pricked his finger getting blood on the garter. Meiji remained unperturbed and dignified throughout the presentation but once retired to his private chambers, he broke out laughing and asked “What am I supposed to do with such a thing?”

(via) Empress Huruko preferred western style clothing and developed her own style, influencing fashion throughout Japan.

Meiji was fated to be surrounded by enlightened and farsighted advisers including notably Iwakura Tomomi in Meiji’s early life and Ito Hirobumi in Meiji’s later life. He also benefited greatly from the presence of his longtime teacher Motoda Nagazane who taught Meiji to look to the East for moral and ethical guidance even while looking to the West for science, technology, modern universal education, and constitutional governance. Meiji was also greatly assisted in his lifetime duties by the extraordinary Empress Huruko (posthumously known as Shoken)

Meiji’s birth chart

Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” is a wild, epic journey into post independence India/Pakistan. The title refers to the 500 children born in the first hour of India’s independence. These children were endowed with special powers. The first born and main character has the psychic ability to communicate via telepathy with the others. We follow his Muslim family’s life through the big events of independent India. This novel is a history viewed through the imagination of a unique writing genius. If you haven’t cared for his other work including “Satanic Verses”, give this one a try.

Climbing peaks above 8000 Meters is a unique sport requiring a combination of luck and a natural ability to survive at these altitudes. Climbing skills are necessary but are secondary to these two characteristics. The recent explosion of interest in extreme sports as an ego enhancer is nowhere more misplaced than the attempts of amateurs with money to try to climb Everest and the other giants. This came home in a big way during the tragic climbing season in 1996 when several “guided” expeditions overstayed their summit efforts and were caught by a storm resulting in eight deaths including two of the expeditions leaders American Scott Fischer and New Zea lander Rob Hall. Accounts of this tragedy include Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer a writer who was a part of Fischer’s group. Another account of the tragedy is found in High Exposure by David F. Breashears.
Krakauer criticized two of Fischer’s guides for climbing without supplemental oxygen; Anatoli Boukreev and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa. Boukreev was deeply hurt by the criticism and wrote his own book of the events The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston Dewalt. In reading these works, I became fascinated by Boukreev. Who was he and why was he such a remarkable climber. Boukreev was a Kazakh born near 8000 meter peaks which always attracted him. He trained hard and became a member of the Soviet climbing team just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Boukreev needed money and support to continue his climbing which ultimately led to his guiding expeditions. His extreme talent as a climber and his taciturn personality probably made him ill suited as a guide but he had little choice if he wanted to pursue his life’s passion. No one could climb with Boukreev. His specialty was speed climbing without oxygen. He still holds many climbing records including climbing two 8000 meter peaks in one day, and speed records for accents from base camp to summit for a number of peaks. On one legendary climb, he returned to his single tent camp on the descent only to find the tent occupied by another climber. Ever the gentleman, Boukreev, after drinking hot tea with the intruding climber, continued his descent to base camp. Between 1988 and 1997, Anatoli climbed eleven of the fourteen 8000 meter peaks without oxygen; four in a single ninety day period-establishing difficult technical routes as well as speed records. He died in an avalanche on Annapurna on Christmas day in 1997. His diaries were published in 2001 Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer by Anatoli Boukreev.
Also interesting and under appreciated are the many Sherpa mountain climbers starting with the legendary Tenzing Norgay Sherpa who first climbed Everest with Hillary. The ensuing widespread interest in mountain climbing has been a mixed blessing to the Sherpa who have been able to start schools and train generations of mountain climbers and guides. A special account of the Sherpa is found in Tenzing Norgay and the Sherpas of Everest by Tenzing, Tashi (Norgay’s grandson).